Murray Ross

Duck Primer

The Wild Duck is the most complex and thought-provoking play of our season, and it has raised more than a few questions from our audience members.  Many of these cannot and perhaps should not be answered with complete certainty, but here are two things you might want to know.

What's all this about "the thirteenth man" at the table?  

This turns out to be a very old superstition, dating at least as far back as Jesus when Judas was notoriously the 13th disciple at the Last Supper.  Since ancient times, 12 has always been a good magic number: the 12 Gods of Olympus, the 12 Knights of the Round Table, etc.  Adding another is not only odd, it upsets dining arrangements (a large table will comfortably seat 5 on each side and 1 at each end).  But more than this, the addition of a 13th person in a group of 12 was seen as a portent bad luck, and even of death. An old Norse legend tells how the gods sat down to dinner and a  13th uninvited god (Loki) turned up, which led to a series of apocalyptic unprecedented very bad disasters.  

So Hakon Werle, at the beginning of the play, is distressed to find there were 13 at the dinner party he gave for his son and fiancee.  He is an old man, going blind, with a guilty conscience, very aware of his imminent mortality.  He implies that it is son's guest, Hjalmar Ekdal, who is the 13th man.  But at the end of the play, we learn the 13th man is someone else entirely.

What's the big deal about "sacrifice"?

Gregers Werle, the play's crusading idealist and the man with a mission, tends to talk about the importance of making a sacrifice at critical moments in the play.  According to Arnold Weinstein, the author of the fine book Northern Arts, the source of this can be found in Kierkegaard's most influential work, Fear and Trembling, which discusses the radical significance of Abraham's decision to sacrifice his own son-- a decision which Kierkegaard suggests was deeply irrational, unnatural, and made in immense anxiety in defiance of all standard codes of behavior.

Yet such a radical commitment is exactly what real faith demands, and radical behavior is what is required if we are to annihilate old forms that close us in and keep us from being truly free.  When Gregers invites young Hedwig to sacrifice what is most precious to her to demonstrate her love, he is following in the philosopher's footsteps. So yes, it is a big deal, none bigger!

IBSEN IS #2!

We all know who is #1--in theatre, in literature and almost everywhere else.  William Shakespeare is way out in front, has been for some time, and will be for the foreseeable future.  No one else is close.  But the fellow running solidly in second place, the dramatist whose work is performed throughout the world more often than any one other than Shakespeare, is this guy.

He's not a man to cuddle up to.  There are dozens of Ibsen portraits and photos and not one of them contains the ghost of a smle.

 

Henrik Ibsen's reputation in America is almost as forbidding as his portraits. He's not the first fellow who comes to mind when we think of a great night out. It's like partying on a cold foggy beach full of jagged rocks with something dying in the weeds. And yet.  And yet he is the second most performed playwright in the the world! The Doll House is actually the most performed play, according to Pravda anyway.  I went back to our records and found that Wild Duck is our fourth play by Henrik Ibsen, which actually makes him second with us too (previous productions include Hedda Gabler, Doll House and, memorably with the symphony, Peer Gynt). 

So it turns out people actually do want to party with Ibsen, and for good reason too.  He's actually great theatre--and by that I mean he's exciting, mysterious, and completely accessible.  Ibsen arrived on the scene at the end of the 19th century.  The high tide of melodrama was still running strong, but the new wave of realism was about to replace it.  Ibsen has a reptutation as one of the fathers of realism, and also of modernism, and the reputation is deserved.  But this should not obscure his melodramatic heritage and roots. Most Ibsen is melodrama!  There are heroes, victims, innocents, corruptors of virtue, secrets, dark pasts coming to light, loaded letters in the mailbox, daring rescues and sudden knocks on the door.  There is passion, excitement, discovery, pathos and excruciating tension.  Now this is great stuff to begin with, but with Ibsen it gets better because he brilliantly gives melodrama new twists, turns and dimensions which had never been seen before, and which have never been bettered since.

The Wild Duck is rarely performed in America, even thought Ibsen considered it is masterpiece.  In the middle of rehearsals now, I am finding out why.  We have the rare luxury of being able rehearse days as well as nights,and we are finding we need all the time we can get: the the characters are rich and particular, the action is detailed and complex, and the power is cumulative and astonishing.  This is a time when I feel I am the luckiest man in the world, and i don't even mind if i look a little more like the playwright every day.  But I don't mind, because Ibsen is not just another pretty face: he's #2!

 

 

 

He's so that guy!

Andrew Jackson is in town for a a few weeks, and I can tell you in person he doesn't look much like the president on your $20 bill.  He looks more like this guy---younger, tougher, more crazed and charismatic.  Actually, he's kind of like this guy updated, with his skinny jeans, metal and better dance moves. The student theatre has thrown everything they've got into Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and that's a whole lot.  Besides a writhing, whiny, soulful rockin' presidential studmuffin, there are pretty girls who cheerlead and make out on executive order.  There's a girlfriend wife who is at least as beautiful as this tarted up sappy portrait of Rachel Dolson, the nice woman who committed bigamy to marry Andrew.  Only in this show, she likes to cut herself with her new hubby.

 

Besides Andrew and his girls, there are also several presidents and senators (most of them east coast eltitist News York Times reading twits), many anonymous indians (some killing, many more being killed), and enough paraphernalia and dead animals to fill a Smithsonian basement. The whole wild west show is presided over by a gee whiz idolatrous narrator, at least until she is put aside in a particularly decisive moment. At the Bon Vivant theater the cup of our manifest destiny truly overfloweth!

Don't go if the celebratory indulgence of the f word offends you.  If you are a native American you might not like it (the play makes much of exposing Jackson's racial genocide, yet the indians remain as much objects of satirical reduction as everyone else in the show). But if you like your theatre rowdy, exuberent, rocking and very very American, with quite a bit of wiki-history thrown in, you're likely to have a very good 100 minutes in a 19th century country that looks an awful lot like the one we live in right now.

It's a great show for those of us who put bumper stickers on our trucks.  It's a great show for those of us who care about the second amendment.  It is full of angst, gusto and anger.  It smells of tea and good Kentucky bourbon. Its juts the thing for the vigorous, the  determined, and the confused who are going to reclaim our great nation:

 . . . it's the early 19th century
And we're gonna take this country back
From people like us who don't just think about things
People who make things happen.
Sometimes with guns
Sometimes with speeches too.
And also other things.

And bloody bloody Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States,is the man for this job. He's so that guy!

 

 

Night Ride

Medieval theatre was not quite theatre as we know it. It was created at time when theatre was emerging from the womb of the church, and it remains deeply bound to its mother.  But it occupies a space of its own, a zone between religious ritual and secular show biz.  It works on its audiences in quite a special way, quite differently from today's entertainment.  I began to understand this the other night when I went out for a ride on my own.

Everyman, as we know, is a play about the journey of a man (who represents all men and women) going to his death.  Death of course was everywhere in the 15th century, just as it is now, and even though it was much more visible it still often came as a surprise--as these famous Holbein woodcuts of death's dance illustrate. 

Like the woodcuts, the play asks us to be intensely aware of death, but more than awareness it lifts us into another plane of reality.  We watch Everyman confronting his own death, and in doing so our vision changes--or at least mine does.

I went out on Saturday night about 9 o'clock to drive the route our bus will take during the route of our show--I hadn't seen it when it was dark. The bus will take us down a few streets I rarely travel, and many of them are very quiet.  I also wanted to listen to some of the music we'll  be playing on our bus, which Alex Ruhlin has wonderfully refitted for sound.  Listening to the music, imagining riding with Everyman, watching the small houses on the dark streets, thinking always of death--it's not the sort of thing I do every day or night. Driving past a desolate city park, three boys were playing basketball on a lighted court:they looked like ghosts.  On Platte avenue I saw the school band walking down the sidewalk after a game; a tuba gleamed in a street light.  I looked at the signs lit up downtown and the north end: so many banks!  So many churches!  Really at night it's not so different from the 15h century, with the Norman tower of Grace Episcopal glowing, and the cross lit up high on Penrose hospital.  Lights in the dark. With the play running through my mind, as it has been doing for the last several weeks, the world seemed close yet far away, something I was floating over, on the way to leaving.  600 years between the 15h century and now disappeared; I felt like I was feeling the play in a way not so different from its original audience. I believe that this is the space the Medieval theatre wants to usher us into, considering the world in a new way, as something temporal, and more illusory than the eternal but often invisible realities which inform it.  

Considered as a play, Everyman might seem crude by contemporary standards.  The language is often repititive, the verse is simple and sometimes clumsy. But its effect can be remarkable.  You might think contemplating death is a grim prospect, but in this play, where we are taught "how transitory we be all day,"  I felt strangely peaceful, an in-and-out of body experience.  And indeed, as the play's Messenger informs us, "this matter is wondrous precious, and sweet to bear away."

 

Seeing Red

Many years ago I got a very mixed review for the first original work of theatre I wrote for the stage, a play about the notorious Scopes Monkey trial in Dayton, Tennessee.  The reviewer said my play didn't give my good actors enough to do.  The line went in as easily as a stiletto,and cut to the quick.  I liked my play, and still do, but there was some justice in the observation.  A really good play gives good actors something good to do.  Hamlet springs to mind . . .

And so does John Logan's new play, Red. I saw it in London 3 years ago, where it was a smash hit. I got a standing room only ticket and stood high up holding on to a rail at the Donmar Warehouse, and its 90 minutes flew by. We had the good luck to meet with another playwright shortly afterwards, Sir Tom Stoppard, and he was just as enthusiastic.  "Did you see Red," he asked.  "Wasn't the acting marvellous!"  It was marvellous, but it was so partly because the playwright was throwing some very good meat, red meat, to his two hungry lions.  Logan gave these guys lots to do.

You might not think so on first reading.  The play takes place entirely in an artist's studio, and what they do is talk.  Well, really, Mark Rothko talks--and talks, and talks.  But his talk is a kind of doing, since he is taking on the universe, the entire history of art, his place in the firmament, the meaning of painting, his fellow contemporaries, public taste, Frederich Nietzsche, and the color red.  For starters.  Mostly his young and awed assistant listens, but then we learn he has a story to tell of his own, and finally, very late in the play, he confronts the Great Man directlly, and believe me, that takes some doing.

To give one example of talk as action, there is a moment in the play where the two artists trade variations of the color red with images, as if they were tennis players volleying at the net.  The conversation goes like this:

Ken: "Sunrise is red and red is sunrise."

Red is heartbeat

Red is passion. Red wine. Red roses.

Red lipstick.  Beets. Tulips.Peppers.

ROTHKO:  Aterial blood.

KEN  That too.

ROTHKO    Rust on the bike on the lawn

KEN  And apples ... and tomatoes

ROTHKO  Dresden firestorm at night

 

The sun in Rousseau,

 

 

The flag in Delacroix, the robe in El Greco

KEN    A rabbit's nose.  An albino's eyes.  A parakeet.

ROTHKO     Florentine marble. Atomic flash.

 

Nick yourselfshaving.  Blood in the Barbasol.

KEN     The ruby slippers. Technicolor.That phone to the Kremlin on the President's desk.

ROTHKO  Russian flag. Nazi Flag. Chinese Flag.

 

KEN    Persmimmons. Pomegranates.

Red Light District. Red tape. Rouge.

ROTHKO  Lava. Lobsters. Scorpions.

KEN Stop sign. Sports car.  A blush.

 

ROTHKO    Viscera.  Flame.  Dead Fauvists.

KEN     Traffic lights. Titian hair.

 

ROTHKO:  Slash your wrist. Blood in the sink.

 

KEN  Santa Claus

ROTHKO  Satan.

(Beat). So. . . red.

KEN Exactly.

As you can see there's a lot of red bouncing off these walls.  And there's a lot more red on our set. Rothko's reds. You can find out more about them here:

http://theamericanscholar.org/seeing-red/

And you can come see some very red blooded actors in this very passionate play, too. We strongly recommend it.

Happy Holidays!

 

 

THEATREWORKS is actually closed for one full week!  This never happens! We hope to use the time as we hope you use yours--eating, drinking, singing, dancing, eating Essie's candy, playing games and giving thanks. 

It's true this season feels less festive to me than many in times past. The tragic events in Newtown, the looming cliff, the gridlocked congress are not launching us collectively towards joy. The cinders of our fire remain.

But we can certainly thank you for spending time with us--- THEATREWORKS is one place where people of all sorts of persuasions and backgrounds can come to share life,art and each other.  One of our most generous contributors calls me Mutt.  I call him Jeff.  At THEATREWORKS Mutts and Jeffs play together very happily.  We check our assault weapons at the door and then throw them in the leftover eggnog.

We didn't do Christmas Carol this year, but we can hardly do Christmas without Dickens. Here's what Scrooge's nephew says about the holidays, words which have been heard in our theater and many theaters, for many years:

"I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time . . as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!'

So it's Christmas Eve! Nearly 7:00 O'Clock! Listen to old Fezziwig:

'Yo ho, my boys!' said Fezziwig. 'No more work to-night. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer!  'Clear away, my lads, and let's have lots of room here! Hilli-ho, Dick! Chirrup, Ebenezer!'

Bring in the fiddler!  Let him tune like 50 stomach aches! Start up the dance!  May your calves twinkle like moons!  Happy New Year!

The Master of Broadway

Nearly everyone has heard of the great American playwrights: Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Not so many people know George S. Kaufman, which is surprising considering how he dominated American theater during the middle of the last century. 

For 37 straight years (1921-58) there was a play on Broadway either written or directed by Kaufman, a record which will almost certainly never be broken.  The plays he directed were important and legendary   (Guys and Dolls, Of Mice and Men. The Front Page), and the plays he wrote have proved to be our most enduring comedies.  Kaufman was a vivid personality—gangly, baleful, his long face made longer by high piled hair above and a large bow tie below. He was not handsome in a conventional sense, but was well known as a ladies man: after a movie star’s diary recounting some intimate moments showed up in print, Kaufman was named “Public Lover Number One.”  Yet he, along with his fabulous contemporaries Robert Benchley, James Thurber, S. J.Perelman, Ring Lardner and Dorothy Parker, are no longer household names.

There are reasons for this.  Partly it’s because Kaufman (along with the others I have named) was a genius of comedy, and comedy has a reputation for being less important and more dated than tragedy.  But there’s more to it. Kaufman was the master of Broadway, but his mastery was always achieved through collaboration. He only wrote one play on his own.  The rest (including two Pulitzer Prize winners) were co-authored with contemporaries like the George and Ira Gershwin, the Marx Brothers, Edna Ferber, Morrie Ryskind and Moss Hart. Kaufman wasn’t just a divinely gifted wit (Groucho Marx called him “my personal god”), he was first and last a pure man of the theater, and theatre is always a team effort.  He was a rigorous technician and craftsman, the guy you could count on to stay up late to cut, rewrite, and reshape the molten mess of drama into something sharp, and firm and satisfying.  He was the ultimate “theatre doctor”—the one you called to fix a show that was in trouble out of town. He was a fanatic about keeping the narrative ball rolling, even in a musical.  He called Frank Loesser’s great songs in Guys and Dolls  “lobby numbers” because each time one started he’d race to the lobby for a cigarette, muttering “Good God, do we have to do every number this son-of-a-bitch ever wrote?”

You Can’t Take It With You, which THEATREWORKS is producing for the holidays, has no lobby numbers.  When music plays on stage (Beethoven on the xylophone) the story keeps going.  The play was written swiftly, in a few weeks, when Kaufman and Hart were clearly in a groove. 

Kaufman gave Hart first billing as author, because he believed the one with the idea of the play should come first.  And Moss Hart had a great idea: take a bohemian family living in contented bedlam and invade it with threats from Wall Street and the IRS. Make it end happily. But you feel Kaufman’s touch everywhere, in the abundant wit, the sharp exchanges, the giddy playfulness, all underpinned with a firm and economic dramatic structure. This is the play Woody Allen found and read in a library when he was 8 years old and laughed out loud.  It was funny then, and it’s funny now:  the comedy is still of our time. 

 You might think this an odd choice for a holiday play, since there’s not a hint of Christmas anywhere, and none of the usual claptrap that comes with the season. Kaufman was notorious for appearing on a Christmas television show and expressing the hope that this would be the one program that didn’t include singing “Silent Night.”  He was famously unsentimental.  Moss Hart remembered once trying to pay him a public tribute, and seeing Kaufman, sensing compliments to come, rise in one sudden movement, “like a large bird frighted out of its solitude in the marshes.”  He fled the room.  Yet, as is often the case, this aggressive mask of anti-sentimentality concealed and protected a tender heart. You will see this tenderness unmasked, alive and well in the Sycamore family in You Can’t Take it With You.  I suspect the play’s producers knew what they were doing when they decided to open the show on December 14, 1936.  It played for 837 performances.  It has been regularly revived all over the country ever since.  It is truly a treasure, a golden glowing play by our greatest Master of Broadway.

 

 

Suffer! Enjoy!

Here's a comment from one of our favorite subscribers after seeing The Glass Menagerie: "Did we "enjoy" the play you ask?  Uh, I suppose, but geez, I had to find someone to shove bamboo slivers under my fingernails to cheer me up."  He also praised the acting and the production.  His feeling is not untypical--it's not a play with a happy ending (in fact you could say it ends badly for everyone), and apparently it doesn't leave everyone in the audience feeling happy either. The word on the street about the play is that it's sad, it's painful, it's depressing.  Is it any wonder that our production, though beautiful and much admired, is not drawing record crowds?

The real wonder is that in the great ages of theatre audiences seem to have enjoyed watching people suffer more than anything else. I'm teaching a course in Greek tragedy at the moment, and everyone knows that 5th century Athens was a high water mark for humanity--at least judged by the creation of democracy, the Parthenon, and a theatre that remains unsurpassed.  It was also a time of unrivalled theatrical suffering.  For one festive week the citizens of Athens spent all their time and energy watching plays in which terrible things happen to people, from which they never recover and rarely survive. You can make all sorts of arguments about how Greek theatre was connected to ritual, that it was didactic, and so on---but the fact remains that for about 50 great years the city crowded into their 15,000 seat theatre to watch the worst that could happen.  Putting your eyes out, being hacked down in the bathtub by your wife, torn apart by horses, buried alive, etc. Now that's entertainment! And so it was.

The Elizabethans, too, liked their suffering.  Think of Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Titus, Dr. Faustus, and virtually all the leading men and women in Middleton, Ford, Marlowe and the rest.  You know the stories.

None of this, we know, could ever happen in America--it could never happen here.  We like a positive spin on things, we like our escapes, we like being uplifted.  Imagine a THEATREWORKS season of Long Day's Journey into Night, Prometheus Bound, Three Sisters, King Lear, Endgame, and The Glass Menagerie.  Six of the greatest plays ever written! It might have been box office at the Globe or the Theatre of Dionysus, but you know it would sink us like a stone.

And yet, intense and regular suffering did happen here, in America,just once, and for a very short time. Between 1945-50 you could have seen, and on Broadway(!) a handful of plays that are on anyone's short list of the greatest drama in our history: The Glass Menagerie (1945--563 performances); The Iceman Cometh (1946-136 performances); A Streetcar Named Desire (1947-855 performances); Death of a Salesman (1949-742 performances).  This is a very concentrated and unrelieved dosage of suffering, pain and unhappy endings.  And they were all hits--they were entertainment! It hasn't happened since.

What can we make of this? One hypothesis is the appetite for suffering on stage rises in direct proportion to the prosperity of the culture.  The happier, healthier, and richer you are at home the more pain you can handle (and even look forward to) on stage. It may be no accident that the great ages of tragedy in western civilization occurred at high tides of the cultures that created them: Athens was rich and on top of the Mediterranean; England was feeling its oats after defeating the Spanish Armada, sending its ships to hunt and gather all over the world; and America was emerging as the great new world power, an unprecedented engine of production. This may be a far too facile explanation, but it will do until a better one is proposed. What do you think?

If my rule is correct, what does it say about our state of things now?  We aren't in the deepest of crises (in World War II you could see nothing but comedy and musicals on Broadway), but nor are we in a zone of national confidence and vigor. We tend to think tragedy is sad, it's depressing, it's a downer.  And who wants to feel depressed?  When you are depressed you feel like this (I know because I looked for depression on Google images):

And who wants to watch a show feeling like that?  But I have some news.  This is not the actual experience of tragedy. Tragedy does not leave an audience hunched over and tucked in and locked down. Tragedy does the opposite--it leaves you more open; emotionally drained, yes, but also more full--in fact fuller than you were before the play started.  And this applies even to my favorite subscriber, who claims post show misery but in fact was prompted to send his very cheerful note. I have another good friend, an eminent theatre-goer, who claims that audiences leaving tragedies look a lot happier and more energized than audiences leaving comedies.  No need for those bamboo slivers. It's true that tragedy takes something out of you, but it also gives you something back.  The play may leave you feeling shattered, but very soon you'll be back together and stonger than ever. Suffering is good for you; it makes you feel better, braver, happier and more entertained.  Just ask the 5th century Athenian leaving the theater after watching six hours of psychic and physical dismemberment, or the Elizabethan who saw Hamlet yesterday afternoon and is looking forward to The Revenger's Tragedy on Wednesday, or the mid-century American who saw Laura blow out her candles last night, and will gather at the grave of Willy Loman tomorrow.

Perhaps now you will begin to understand the real road to our national recovery: seeing more suffering on stage and liking it too.  It will make everyone stronger, braver, happier and more energized.  You want your America back?  Go to The Glass Menagerie. Good times are not in the immediate future of the Wingfield family, but they are there just ahead, for you.

 

 

 

 

St.Louis, 1937

In Spain,there was revolution.  In Spain, there was Guernica.

Here there was only noise, confusion and  labor disturbances:

The old home in East Tennessee is no longer in the family.

In St. Louis, mom remembers the jonquils of yesteryear.

Ands sells subscriptions to Romance Magazines

The son works in a shoe factory.

And a shy young girl looks at the moon out her window

When the lights go out, the candles are lit.

Could this finally be Laura's night?

Yes!

And no.

It happens all the time. Now and in the past. In life, in memory and in dreams.

Thanks to Tennessee Williams, Gregory Crewdson, and the cast and crew of THE GLASS MENAGERIE

 

 

The critics weigh in

For several centuries critics have been debating the merits of our summer play, Love's Labor's Lost. "If we were to part with any of the author's comedies, it would should be this," begins William Hazlitt, one of Shakespeare's best 19th century interpreters. You might think that would introduce an essay of condemnation, but you would be mostly wrong:  Hazlitt goes on to affectionately praise the characters of Armado, Moth, Holofernes, Nathanial, and Berowne, as well as quoting several feliciious passages.  And while he claims that in this play Shakespeare's might genius has never been deployed on so slight a subject (as if "Titian had been employed to give grace to the curtls of a full bottomed periwig"), Hazlitt can't help but delight in the curls he dismisses.

George Bernard Shaw, who liked to compare his own great genius with his dramatic forebearer's, begins his essay in a similar negative vein:  "A performance of Love's Labor's Lost is a sort of entertainment to be valued for Shakespear's sake than for its own."  But Shaw too is beguiled by this "sunny, joyous and delightful play" he says, "Much of the verse is charming: even when it is rhymed doggrell it is full of that bewitching Shakespearean music which tempts the susceptible critic to sugar his ink and declare that Shakespear can do no wrong." His essay ends with the same doublemindedness:  "On the whole, I am not sure that Love's Labor's Lost is worth reviving at this time of day; but I am bound to add that if were announced to-morrow with an adequate cast, I should make a point of seeing it."

Our distinguished Prologue guest, Stephen Booth, one of the world's leading Shakespeare authorities, confessed a similar ambivilance in his podcast interview with Kevin Landis, which you can hear here:

http://www.theatreworkscs.org/resources/podcasts/StephenBooth.mp3

For a long time Professor Booth thought Love's Labor's was a play that was better to think about than see, but he has changed his mind.  You can hear more at his free Prologue talk in our Rock Ledge Ranch tent, Saturday, August 4, at 6:00 p.m.  The lecture is free for all.

Finally, that Pasha of Shakespeare critics, Harold Bloom, makes this remarkable confession:  "we all have particular favorities, in literature as in life, and I take more unmixed pleasure from Love's Laboru's Lost than from any Shakepearean play."  He goes on to say, "Alas, I have never seen a production of theis extravagent comedy that could begin to perform to is vocal magnificence, but I always live in hope that some director of genius will yet deliver it to us."

We cannot promise such a director, nor a company that would satisy this sultan of Shakespeare, but I have sent camels to tell him that here at Rock Ledge Ranch we have actors who can sing as well as be very silly (and silliness is purity, as a friend once explained).  And I have notified George Bernard Shaw in his empyreum that we have indeed an adequate cast, and that indeed he should make a point of seeing the production.  And so should you!